# Fare Evasion

There’s a moralistic discourse in the United States about fare evasion on public transport that makes it about every issue other than public transport or fares. It’s a proxy for lawlessness, for police racism, for public safety, for poverty. In lieu of treating it as a big intra-urban culture war, I am going to talk about best practices from the perspective of limiting revenue loss to a minimum.

This is an issue where my main methodology for making recommendations for Americans – looking at peer developed countries – is especially useful. The reason is that Americans practically never look at other countries on hot-button culture war issues, even less than (say) the lip service the center-left pays to foreign universal health care systems. Americans who support immigration liberalization practically never listen when I try bringing up the liberal work visa, asylum, and naturalization policies of Germany or Sweden. Knowing stuff about the rest of the world is a type of competence, and competence is not a factor in a culture war. The upshot is that successful policies regarding fare collection in (for example) Germany are obscure in the United States even more than policies regarding wonkier transportation issues like train frequency.

The current situation in New York

In the summer, Governor Cuomo announced a new initiative to hire 500 cops to patrol the subway. The justification for this scheme has varied depending on who was asking, but the primary goal appears to be to defeat fare evasion. Per Cuomo’s office, fare evasion costs $240 million a year on the subway and buses, about 5% of total revenue. The MTA has also mentioned a higher figure,$300 million; I do not know if the higher figure includes just urban transit or also commuter rail, where conductors routinely miss inspections, giving people free rides.

But New York fare evasion is mostly a bus problem: the rate on buses is 22%. On the subway the rate is only 4%, and there is somewhat more revenue loss on buses than on subways. This, in turn, is because bus fares are enforced by drivers, who for years have complained that fare disputes lead to assaults on them and proposed off-board fare collection as an alternative. On many buses, drivers just let it go and let passengers board without paying, especially if nearly all passengers are connecting from the subway and therefore have already paid, as on the B1 between the Brighton Beach subway station and Kingsborough Community College or on the buses to LaGuardia.

So realistically the subway fare evasion level is closer to $110 million a year. The total cost of the new patrol program is$56 million in the first year, escalating by 8% annually thanks to a pre-agreed pay hike scale. Whereas today the program is a net revenue generator if it halves subway fare evasion, a level that already seems strained, within ten years, assuming normal fare escalation, it will need to cut fare evasion by about 90%, which is a complete fantasy. A sizable proportion of riders who do not pay would just stop riding altogether, for one. The governor is proposing to spend more on fare enforcement than the MTA can ever hope to extract.

The American moral panic about fare evasion regrettably goes far beyond New York. Two years ago, BART announced that it would supplement its fare barriers with proof-of-payment inspections, done by armed cops, and lied to the public about the prevalence of such a belts-and-suspenders system. More recently, it trialed a new turnstile design that would hit passengers in the face, but thankfully scrapped it after public outcry. Boston, too, has its moral panic about fare evasion, in the form of campaigns like the Keolis Ring of Steel on commuter rail or Fare is Fair.

There is another way

In talking to Americans about fare evasion, I have found that they are generally receptive to the idea of minimizing revenue loss net of collection costs. However, what I’ve encountered more resistance about is the idea that people should just be able to walk onto a bus or train.

In the urban German-speaking world, everyone with a valid fare can walk onto a bus, tram, or train without crossing fare barriers or having to pay a driver. This system has been copied to American light rail networks, but implementation on buses and subways lags (except on San Francisco buses). In New York, the SBS system uses proof of payment (POP), but passengers still have to validate fares at bus stops, even if they already have paid, for example if they have a valid monthly pass.

In the vast majority of cities, no excuse exists to have any kind of overt fare control. Tear down these faregates. They are hostile to passengers with disabilities, they cost money to maintain, they constrain passenger flow at busy times, and they don’t really save money – evidently, New York’s subway fare evasion rate is within the range of Berlin, Munich, and Zurich. Fare enforcement should be done with POP alone, by unarmed civilian inspectors, as in Berlin. Some people will learn to dodge the inspectors, as is the case in Berlin, and that’s fine; the point is not to get fare evasion to 0%, but to the minimum level net of enforcement costs.

New York itself may have an excuse to keep the faregates: its trains are very crowded, so peak-hour inspections may not be feasible. The question boils down to how New York crowding levels compare with those on the busiest urban POP line, the Munich S-Bahn trunk. But no other American city has that excuse. Tear down these faregates.

What’s more, the fare inspection should be a low-key affair. The fine in Berlin is €60. In Paris on the RER I can’t tell – I believe it’s three figures of which the first is a 1. Inspectors who can’t make a citation without using physical violence should not work as inspectors.

Make it easy to follow the law

The most important maxim when addressing a low-level crime is to make it easy to follow the law. Mistakes happen; I’ve accidentally fare-dodged in Berlin twice, only realizing the error at the end of the trip. This is much more like parking violations or routine mistakes in tax filing.

The turnstile acts as a reminder to everyone to pay their fare, since it’s not possible to fare-dodge without actively jumping it. (I did turnstile-jump in Paris once, with a valid transfer ticket that the turnstile rejected, I think because Paris’s turnstile and magnetic ticket technology is antediluvian.) However, turnstiles are not necessary for this. A better method is to ensure most passengers have prepaid already, by offering generous monthly discounts. My fare dodges in Berlin happened once before I got monthlies and once on my way to the airport on my current trip, in a month when I didn’t get a monthly since I was only in Berlin 6 days.

New York does poorly on the metric of encouraging monthlies. Passengers need to swipe 46 times in a 30-day period to justify getting a monthly pass rather than a pay-per-ride. This is bad practice, especially for passengers who prefer to refill at a ticketing machine rather than at home or on their phone with an app, since it means passengers visit the ticketing machines more often, requiring the agency to buy more to avoid long lines. In Berlin, the breakeven point is 36 trips. In Zurich, it’s 20 trips; ZVV does whatever it can to discourage people from buying single tickets. In both cities, there are further discounts for annual tickets.

Unfortunately, the problem of indifference to monthlies on urban rail is common around the Anglosphere. Singapore has no season passes at all. In Vancouver, Cubic lobbying and a New Right campaign about fare evasion forced TransLink to install faregates on SkyTrain, and when the faregate project had predictable cost overruns, the campaigners took that as evidence the agency shouldn’t get further funding. London’s fare capping system is weekly rather than monthly – there are no monthly passes, and all fares are set at very high levels. Britain generally overuses faregates, for example on the commuter trains in London. London generally gives off an impression of treating everyone who is not a Daily Mail manager as a criminal. Paris is better, but not by much. The German-speaking world, as irrational as Britain and France about urban crime rates that are far lower than they were a generation ago, still treats the train and bus rider as a law-abiding customer unless proven otherwise.

Social fares

American transit agencies and activists resist calls for large monthly discounts, on a variety of excuses. The most common excuse is revenue loss, which is weird since realistically New York would transition to a large discount through holding the monthly fare constant and hiking the single-ride fare. It’s the second most common excuse that I wish to deal with here: social fares, namely the fact that many low-income riders don’t have the savings to prepay for an entire month.

On social fares, as on many other socioeconomic issues, it is useful for Americans to see how things work in countries with high income compression and low inequality under the aegis of center-left governments. In Paris, various classes of low-income riders, such as the unemployed, benefit from a solidarity fare discount of 50-75%. In both Paris and Stockholm, the monthly pass is flat regionwide, an intentional program of subsidizing regular riders in the suburbs, which are on average poorer than the city.

The flat fare is not really applicable to American cities, except possibly the Bay Area on BART. However, the large fare reductions to qualifying low-income riders are: a number of cities have used the same definition, namely Medicaid eligibility, and give steep discounts for bikeshare systems. On the same principle, cities and states can discount fares on buses and trains.

The right way to view fares

Fares are an important component of public transport revenue; the taxes required to eliminate fares are significant enough that there are probably better uses for the money. By the same token, the issue of fare evasion should be viewed from the lens of revenue loss, rather than that of crime and disorder. The transit agency is not an individual who is broken by being mugged of $100; it should think in terms of its own finances, not in terms of deterrence. Nor is making it easier to follow the law going to encourage more crime – to the contrary. Transit agencies should aim at a fare system, including enforcement, that allows passengers to get on and off trains quickly, with minimum friction. Turnstiles do not belong in any city smaller than about 10 million people. The fare structure should then encourage long-term season passes, including annual passes, so that nearly all residents who take public transport have already paid. Random inspections with moderate fines are the layer of enforcement, but the point is to make enforcement largely unneeded. And tear down the faregates. # When Reliability Matters Above All Else This post is about situations in which the most important thing for transportation is reliability, more so than average speed or convenience. It’s inspired by two observations, separated by a number of years: one is my own about flying into or out of Boston, the other is from a New York Times article from yesterday describing a working-class subway rider’s experience. My observation is that over the years, I’ve used Logan Airport a number of times, sometimes choosing to connect via public transportation, which always involves a bus as the airport is not on the rail network, and other times via taxi or pickup. My choice was always influenced by idiosyncratic factors – for example, which Boston subway line my destination is on, or whether I was visiting someone with a car and free time. However, over the last eight years, a consistent trend is that I am much more likely to use the bus arriving at the airport to the city than departing. I know my own reasoning for this: the bus between South Station and the airport is less reliable than a cab, so when in a crunch, I would take a train to South Station (often from Providence) and then hail a taxi to the airport. The New York Times article is about a work commute, leading with the following story: Maribel Burgos barely has time to change into her uniform before she has to clock in at the McDonald’s in Lower Manhattan where she works, even though she gives herself 90 minutes to commute from her home in East Harlem. It does not take 90 minutes to get between East Harlem and Lower Manhattan on the subway. The subway takes around half an hour between 125th Street and Bowling Green, and passengers getting on at one of the local stations farther south can expect only a few minutes longer to commute with a cross-platform change at Grand Central. Taking walking and waiting time into account, the worst case is around an hour – on average. But the subway is not particularly reliable, and people who work somewhere where being five minutes late is a firing offense have to take generous margins of error. When is reliability the most important? What examples can we think of in which being late even by a little bit is unacceptable? Let us list some, starting with the two motivating examples above: • Trips to the airport • Work trips for highly regimented shift work • Trips to school or to an external exam • Work trips for safety-critical work such as surgery • Trips to an intercity train station In some of these cases, typically when the riders are of presumed higher social class, the system itself encourages flexibility by arranging matters so that a short delay is not catastrophic. At the airport, this involves recommendations for very early arrival, which seasoned travelers know how to ignore. At external exams, there are prior instructions of how to fill in test forms, de facto creating a margin of tolerance; schools generally do not do this and do mark down students who show up late. Doctors as far as I understand have shifts that do not begin immediately with a life-critical surgery. But with that aside, we can come up with the following commonalities to these kinds of trips: • They are trips to a destination, not back home from it • They are trips to a fairly centralized and often relatively transit-oriented destination, such as a big workplace, with the exception of regimented shift work for retail (the original NY Times example), which pays so little nobody can afford to drive • They are disproportionately not peak trips, either because they are not work trips at all, or because they are work trips for work that is explicitly not 9-to-5 office work • They are disproportionately not CBD-bound trips The first point means that it’s easy to miss this effect in mode choice, because people can definitely split choice between taxis and transit or between different transit modes, but usually not between cars and transit. The second means that driving is itself often unreliable, except for people who cannot afford to drive. The third means that these trips occur at a point in time in which frequency may not be very high, and the fourth means that these trips usually require transfers. What does reliability mean? Reliability overall means having low variance in door-to-door trip time. But for the purposes of this discussion, I want to stress again that trips to destinations that require unusual punctuality are likely to occur outside rush hour. Alas, “outside rush hour” does not mean low traffic, because midday and evening traffic in big cities is still quite bad – to take one New York example with shared lanes, the B35 steadily slows down in the first half of the day even after the morning peak is over and only speeds up to the 6 am timetable past 7 pm. Thus, there are twin problems: frequency, and traffic. Traffic means the vagaries of surface traffic. Buses are generally inappropriate for travel that requires any measure of reliability, or else passengers have to use a large cushion. Everything about the mixed traffic bus is unreliable, from surface traffic to wait times, and bunching is endemic. Dedicated lanes improve things, but not by enough, and unreliable frequency remains a problem even on mostly segregated buses like the Silver Line to the airport in Boston. Frequency is the harsher problem. The worker commuting from Harlem to Lower Manhattan is if anything lucky to have a straight-short one-seat ride on the 4 and 5 trains; most people who need to be on time or else are not traveling to city center and thus have to transfer. The value of an untimed transfer increases with frequency, and if every leg of the trip has routine 10-minute waits due to bunching or just low off-peak frequency guidelines, the trip gets intolerable, fast. What’s the solution? Bus redesigns are a big topic in the US right now, often pushed by Jarrett Walker; the latest news from Indianapolis is a resounding success, boasting 30% increase in ridership as a result of a redesign as well as other changes, including a rapid bus line. However, they only affect the issue of reliability on the margins, because they are not about reliability, but about making base frequency slightly better. New York is replete with buses and trains that run every 10-15 minutes all day, but with transfers, this is not enough. Remember that people who absolutely cannot be late need to assume they will just miss every vehicle on the trip, and maybe even wait a few minutes longer than the maximum advertised headway because of bunching. Thus, improving reliability means a wider toolkit, including all of the following features: • No shared lanes in busy areas, ever – keep the mixed traffic to low-traffic extremities of the city, like Manhattan Beach. • Traffic signals should be designed to minimize bus travel time variance through conditional signal priority, focusing on speeding up buses that are running slow; in combination with the above point, the idea of giving a late bus with 40 passengers the same priority at an intersection as a single-occupant car should go the way of the dodo and divine rights of kings. • Off-peak frequency on buses and trains needs to be in the 5-8 minute range at worst. • Cross-platform transfers on the subway need to be timed at key transfer points, as Berlin manages routinely at Mehringdamm when it’s late and trains run every 10 minutes (not so much when they run every 5); in New York it should be a priority to deinterline and schedule a 4-way timed pulse at 53rd/7th. • Branch scheduling should be designed around regular gaps, rather than crowding guidelines – variation between 100% and 130% of seats occupied is less important to the worker who will be fired if late than variation between waiting 4 and waiting 8 minutes for a train. • Suburban transit should run on regular clockface schedules every 30, 20, or 15 minutes, with all transfers timed, including with fare-integrated commuter trains. # New York City Zoning and Subway Capacity I got a bunch of accolades and a bunch of flaming replies over a tweetstorm imagining a bigger, better New York. Some people complained about my claim that subway trains in Brooklyn are underfull; I urge everyone to read my analysis of data from 2016 – it’s still relevant today, as the only big change is that Second Avenue Subway has reduced Upper East Side crowding. The point of this post is to demonstrate where zoning should definitely focus on adding more apartments, to fill trains that are not yet full. The map Instead of using the current subway map, let us start with a deinterlined map: The reason for using this map is that it’s cleaner than the real map, since there is no track-sharing between routes of different colors, and not much route-sharing (one color local, one express). Getting from here to this map is cheap but not free, as it requires certain junction rebuilds, especially on the 2/3. I ask that my commenters resist the temptation to argue over the details of this map, since the point about zoned capacity does not really depend on questions like whether the E runs local in Queens and the F runs express or the reverse. Where there is capacity In 2016, three directions on the subway were truly at capacity, surpassing 4 standees per square meter: the 2/3 and 4/5 coming into Midtown from Uptown, and the L. The analysis looks at crowding on trains entering the Manhattan core, so it lumps lines from Queens based on which tunnel they enter from, which underestimates crowding on the E, since it shares tracks with the under-capacity M. Counted properly, the express Queens Boulevard trains should be viewed as near or at capacity as well, the F having 3.33 standees per square meter and the E having somewhat more. Additional lines with capacity crunches, with about 3 standees per square meter or more, include the A/D coming in from Uptown, the 6, and the Astoria Line (then the N/Q, now the N/W). The 1 and 7 trains have capacity crunches as well in outlying areas: the 7 is overcrowded until it hits the transfer points to the E/F and N/W but has plenty of space in Long Island City, and the 1 is fairly crowded north of the junction with the express trains and then unloads passengers onto the overcrowded 2/3. These areas should not be deemed to have much spare capacity until such time as operations on the subway improve, permitting higher frequency and eventually more lines. In contrast, the remaining lines have space, often plenty of space. Everything in Brooklyn except the L and to some extent the J/M/Z is underfull: these trains have high frequency as determined by crowding guidelines at the Uptown or Queens end, but in Brooklyn there are fewer people today so the ridership is weaker. The local lines on the Upper West Side both have plenty of space on the trains as well as space on the tracks for more trains if need be. The 7 downstream of Queensboro Plaza has plenty of space, and the local Queens Boulevard trains downstream of Jackson Heights have nowhere for passengers to transfer to an overcrowded express service. Since I’m relying on data from 2016, there’s no accounting for Second Avenue Subway. Even then, the 4/5 was only the third most overcrowded trunk line entering the Manhattan core, and it’s likely that there’s additional capacity coming from the new line. There’s certainly space on the tracks for more trains on Second Avenue, and one of the goals of deinterlining specifically is to make it feasible to run more service on this line, which currently only runs a train every 6-8 minutes at rush hour. The map of where New York could add housing The map excludes parts of Lower and Midtown Manhattan where the highest and best use is commercial rather than residential. But the boundaries there are deliberately crude: Downtown Brooklyn, NYU, and the Meatpacking District are drawn, to avoid excessive fragmentation of the drawn area, while Chelsea and Hell’s Kitchen are excluded as too close to Midtown. The map also does not look at considerations other than capacity. Some of the highlit areas on the Upper East and West Sides and Lower East Side are already built to very high density, at least on the avenues and major streets; these areas should be the template of how the rest of the city should look. At the other end, East New York has too weak demand for massive construction, especially if everything to its west is upzoned. However, large swaths of desirable, close-in areas with relatively short buildings are highlit. Rich inner Brooklyn neighborhoods like Park Slope and South Brooklyn are currently built to missing middle density, with a floor area ratio of about 1.5 away from corner lots. A more appropriate floor area ratio in these neighborhoods is 12, corresponding to tapering buildings in the 20-30 story range, as on the avenues on the Upper East and West Sides. Park Slope is half an hour from Midtown by subway, and less than that from Lower Manhattan. The population of these neighborhoods is perhaps 150,000, and should be more than a million given their proximity to job centers. Subway deserts and future additions The map is designed to work with more or less the same service as today, maybe with slightly more frequency on lines that could handle it easily (that is, Second Avenue Subway). But what about future service? The L train is overcrowded, but only runs 19 trains per hour at the peak due to electrical limitations, and could go up to 26 with better electrical capacity, or for that matter lighter trains drawing less power during acceleration. Further extensions of Second Avenue Subway could more effectively relieve pressure off the 4/5, to the point of creating more capacity in the Bronx, which remains well below peak population. Commuter rail modernization opens up large swaths of Queens. Decades in the making extensions on Nostrand and Utica fill in the transit desert in southeast Brooklyn, currently served by buses that nominally come every 2 minutes and in practice comes in platoons of 4 every 8 minutes. As with the map above, a hypothetical map of development sites assuming reasonable subway expansion includes areas that would be unlikely to actually see new development. Williamsburg and Greenpoint may turn into forests of towers given the opportunity, but in neighborhoods like Sheepshead Bay and East Flatbush developers might well stick to the occasional 6-to-10-story mid-rise building that would not look out of place in Paris. In Eastern Queens, the desired density is probably spiky, with clusters of tall buildings around LIRR stations surrounded by single-family houses and missing middle, much like the structure of density in Toronto and Vancouver. # How Fast New York Regional Rail Could Be Part 3 In the third and last installment of my series posting sample commuter rail schedules for New York (part 1, part 2), let’s look at trains in New Jersey. This is going to be a longer post, covering six different lines, namely all New Jersey Transit lines that can go to Penn Station, including one that currently does not (Raritan Valley) but could using dual-mode locomotives. As on Metro-North and the LIRR, very large improvements can be made over current schedules, generally reducing trip times by 30-43%, without straightening a single curve. However, electrification is required, as is entirely new rolling stock, as the electric locomotives used by NJ Transit are ill-fit for a fast schedule with many stops. Moreover, all low platforms must be raised to provide level boarding and some must be lengthened to avoid overuse of selective door opening, which may require a few new grade separations on the North Jersey Coast Line. As a first-order estimate, 50-something trainsets are required, each with 8-12 cars. This is not quite free, but the cost is low single-digit billions: about$1.5 billion for trains, maybe $400 million for 160 km of electrification, and around$700 million for what I believe is 70 low- or short-platform stations.

The timetables

Here is a spreadsheet detailing speed zones for all New Jersey Transit lines passing through Newark. In support of previous posts, here are other similar spreadsheets:

• New Haven Line (express schedule, add stop penalties as appropriate for locals) – the spreadsheet is about a minute too fast, missing some slowdowns in the terminal, and the version in my post (part 1) corrects for that
• Harlem Line
• Hudson Line locals and expresses
• LIRR Main Line (including Port Jefferson, not covered in my posts)

Line by line schedules

The New Jersey Transit timetables are less consistent than the east-of-Hudson ones; I attempted to look at local midday off-peak outbound trains whenever possible.

Northeast Corridor

 Station Current time Future time New York 0:00 0:00 Secaucus 0:09 0:06 Newark Penn 0:18 0:10 Newark South Street — 0:12 Newark Airport 0:24 0:15 North Elizabeth 0:27 0:17 Elizabeth 0:30 0:19 Linden 0:35 0:23 Rahway 0:39 0:25 Metropark 0:45 0:29 Metuchen 0:49 0:32 Edison 0:54 0:36 New Brunswick 0:59 0:39 Jersey Avenue 1:03 0:41 Monmouth Junction — 0:47 Princeton Junction 1:16 0:53 Hamilton 1:23 0:58 Trenton 1:35 1:01

This fastest rush hour express trains do the trip in 1:12-1:13, and Amtrak’s Regionals range between 0:55 and 1:04, with trains making all nominal Amtrak stops (including rarely-served New Brunswick and Princeton Junction) taking 1:15.

North Jersey Coast Line

 Station Current time Future time New York 0:00 0:00 Secaucus 0:09 0:06 Newark Penn 0:19 0:10 Newark South Street — 0:12 Newark Airport 0:24 0:15 North Elizabeth — 0:17 Elizabeth 0:29 0:19 Linden 0:35 0:23 Rahway 0:39 0:25 Avenel 0:45 0:29 Woodbridge 0:48 0:31 Perth Amboy 0:55 0:34 South Amboy 1:00 0:37 Aberdeen 1:08 0:42 Hazlet 1:12 0:45 Middletown 1:19 0:49 Red Bank 1:25 0:53 Little Silver 1:29 0:56 Monmouth Park — 0:59 Long Branch 1:39-1:42 1:01 Elberon 1:46 1:04 Allenhurst 1:50 1:07 Asbury Park 1:54 1:09 Bradley Beach 1:57 1:11 Belmar 2:01 1:14 Spring Lake 2:05 1:16 Manasquan 2:09 1:19 Point Pleasant Beach 2:15 1:22 Bay Head 2:24 1:23

In electric territory, that is up to Long Branch, my schedule cuts 38% from the trip time, but in diesel territory the impact of electrification nearly halves the trip time, cutting 48%.

Raritan Valley Line

 Station Current time Future time New York (0:00) 0:00 Secaucus (0:09) 0:06 Newark Penn (0:18) 0:10 Newark South Street — 0:12 Union 0:27 0:17 Roselle Park 0:30 0:19 Cranford 0:35 0:22 Garwood 0:38 0:24 Westfield 0:41 0:25 Fanwood 0:46 0:28 Netherfields 0:49 0:30 Plainfield 0:53 0:32 Dunellen 0:58 0:35 Bound Brook 1:03 0:39 Bridgewater 1:06 0:41 Somerville 1:12 0:44 Raritan 1:15 0:47 North Branch 1:21 0:50 Whitehouse 1:28 0:54 Lebanon 1:34 0:58 Annandale 1:39 1:01 High Bridge 1:52 1:04

The Raritan Valley Line does not run through to Manhattan but rather terminates at Newark Penn because of capacity constraints on the mainline, so the New York-Newark trip times are imputed from Northeast Corridor trains. So really the trip time difference is 1:34 versus 0:54, a reduction of 42% in the trip time thanks to electrification.

Morristown Line

 Station Current time Future time New York 0:00 0:00 Secaucus 0:10 0:06 Newark Broad Street 0:19 0:11 Newark 1st Street — 0:13 East Orange — 0:15 Brick Church 0:25 0:17 Orange 0:28 0:19 Highland Avenue — 0:21 Mountain — 0:23 South Orange 0:33 0:25 Maplewood 0:38 0:27 Millburn 0:42 0:29 Short Hills 0:45 0:31 Summit 0:49-0:50 0:34 Chatham 0:55 0:39 Madison 0:59 0:41 Convent 1:03 0:44 Morristown 1:07 0:47 Morris Plains 1:11 0:50 Mount Tabor 1:18 0:54 Denville 1:21 0:56 Dover 1:32 1:00 Mount Arlington 1:40 1:06 Lake Hopatcong 1:45 1:09 Netcong 1:53 1:12 Mount Olive 1:58 1:15 Hackettstown 2:14 1:22

This timetable is cobbled from two different train runs, as electric wires only run as far out as Dover, so trains from New York only go as far as Dover, and trains to Hackettstown serve Hoboken instead. Observe the 35% reduction in trip time in electric territory despite making a few more stops, and the 48% reduction in trip time in diesel territory.

 Station Current time Future time New York (0:00) 0:00 Secaucus (0:10) 0:06 Newark Broad Street (0:19) 0:11 Newark 1st Street — 0:13 East Orange 0:24 0:15 Brick Church 0:26 0:17 Orange 0:29 0:19 Highland Avenue 0:31 0:21 Mountain 0:33 0:23 South Orange 0:36 0:25 Maplewood 0:39 0:27 Millburn 0:42 0:29 Short Hills 0:45 0:31 Summit 0:50 0:34 New Providence 0:55 0:37 Murray Hill 0:58 0:40 Berkeley Heights 1:02 0:43 Gillette 1:05 0:46 Stirling 1:08 0:48 Millington 1:11 0:50 Lyons 1:14 0:53 Basking Ridge 1:17 0:56 Bernardsville 1:20 0:57 Far Hills 1:26 1:02 Peapack 1:30 1:06 Gladstone 1:37 1:08

As the line is entirely electrified, the time saving is only 30%. Note that Gladstone Branch trains do not run through to Penn Station except at rush hour, so I’m imputing New York-Newark Broad trip times using the Morristown Line.

Montclair-Boonton Line

 Station Current time Future time New York (0:00) 0:00 Secaucus (0:09) 0:06 Newark Broad Street (0:20) 0:11 Newark 1st Street — 0:13 Newark Park Street — 0:15 Watsessing Avenue 0:26 0:18 Bloomfield 0:28 0:19 Glen Ridge 0:31 0:21 Bay Street 0:34 0:23 Walnut Street 0:37 0:24 Watchung Avenue 0:40 0:26 Upper Montclair 0:43 0:28 Mountain Avenue 0:45 0:30 Montclair Heights 0:47 0:31 Montclair State U 0:50 0:33 Little Falls 0:56 0:37 Wayne-Route 23 1:00 0:40 Mountain View-Wayne 1:02 0:43 Lincoln Park 1:07 0:46 Towaco 1:11 0:49 Boonton 1:18 0:53 Mountain Lakes 1:22 0:56 Denville 1:27 0:59 Dover 1:34 1:04

Beyond Dover, a handful of evening trains continue to Hackettstown. Interestingly, the saving from electrification is only 32% – and the train I drew the current schedule from is a Hoboken diesel train. Electric trains run from New York to Montclair State University, but are for some reason actually slightly slower today than the Hoboken diesels on the shared Newark-MSU segment. I suspect that like the LIRR, NJ Transit does not timetable electric trains to be any faster than diesels on shared segments even though their performance is better.

Discussion

There are specific patterns to where my schedule outperforms the existing one by the largest margin and where it does so by the smallest margin.

Terminal zone

Between New York and Newark, I am proposing that trains take 10-11 minutes, down from 18-20 today, cutting 45% from the trip time. This comes from several factors. The first is avoiding unnecessary slowdowns in terminal zones: Penn Station should be good for about 50 km/h, ideally even more if there are consistent enough platform assignments that the turnouts can be upgraded to be faster; Newark should not impose any speed limit whatsoever beyond that of right-of-way geometry.

The second is increasing superelevation and cant deficiency. The worst curve is the turn from Harrison to Newark; its radius is just shy of 500 meters, good for around 110 km/h at normal cant and cant deficiency (150 mm each), or even 120 km/h if the cant is raised to 200 mm in support of higher-speed intercity service. But the current speed limit is a blanket 45 mph, even on Amtrak, whose cant deficiency is fine. The Newark approach is then even slower, 35 mph, for no reason. It’s telling that on my schedule, the Secaucus-Newark speedup is even greater than the New York-Secaucus speedup, despite the Penn Station interlocking morass.

The third is reducing schedule padding. The schedules appear extremely padded for what NJ Transit thinks is a capacity problem but is not really a problem in the midday off-peak period. Between 9 am and noon, 18 trains depart Penn Station going west, 10 on the Northeast Corridor and North Jersey Coast and 8 on the Morris and Essex Lines and the Montclair Line.

Unelectrified lines

On lines without electrification, the time savings from electrification are considerable, with the exception of the Boonton Line. This is especially notable on the tails of the North Jersey Coast and Morristown Lines, both of which allow for 48% reductions in trip time, nearly doubling the average speed.

This is related to the issue of low platforms. These tails have low platforms, whereas the inner segment of the Raritan Valley Line (up to Westfield), which already has mostly high platforms, does not exhibit the same potential speed doubling. Outer segments may also not be well-maintained, leading to non-geometric speed limits. Between Long Branch and Bay Head the tracks are fairly straight, but the existing speed limits are very low, at most 60 mph with most segments limited to 40 or even 25 or less.

In contrast with the enormous slowdowns between New York and Newark and on unelectrified tails, the workhorse inner segments (including the entire Northeast Corridor Line) radiating out of Newark are only about 1.5 times as slow as they can be, rather than twice as slow. The Gladstone Branch, which runs EMUs rather than electric locomotive-hauled trains, manages to be only about 1.37 times as slow, in large part courtesy of low platforms.

Of course, 1.5 times as slow is still pretty bad. This is because no line on NJ Transit is truly modern, that is running all EMUs serving high platforms. But the electric lines manage to be less bad than the diesel lines, and the suburbs less bad than the New York-Newark segment with its excessive timetable padding and terminal zone slowdowns.

How to get there from here

NJ Transit has a problem: perhaps unaware of the new FRA regulations, it just ordered bilevel EMUs compliant with the old rather than new regulations. If it can cancel the order, it should do so, and instead procure standard European EMUs stretched to the larger clearances of the American (or Nordic) railway network.

Simultaneously, it should complete electrification of the entire Penn Station-feeding system, including the Raritan Valley Line even though right now it does not run through to New York. This includes some outer branches with low traffic, not enough to justify electrification on their own; that is fine, since the 31 km of wire between Dover and Hackettstown, 25 km between Long Branch and Bay Head, 27 between Raritan (where semi-frequent service ends) and High Bridge, and 30 between MSU and Denville permit a uniform or mostly uniform fleet with no diesel under catenary. EMUs are far more reliable than anything that runs on diesel, and if NJ Transit retires diesels and only runs EMUs on the most congested segment of the network, it will be able to get away with far less schedule padding.

In Boston, at Transit Matters we’ve likewise recommended full systemwide electrification, but with priority to lines that connect to already-electric infrastructure, that is the Stoughton branch of the Providence Line, the Fairmount Line (which is short enough to use Northeast Corridor substations), and subsequently the entire South Station-feeding system. By the same token, it is more important to electrify the outer edges of the Morristown and North Jersey Coast Lines and the entire Raritan Valley Line than to electrify the Erie lines not analyzed in this post, since the Erie lines’ infrastructure points exclusively toward Hoboken and not New York.

In addition to electrification, NJ Transit must replace all low platforms with high platforms. This should generally be doable with ramp access rather than elevators to save money, in which case a double-track station should be doable for about $10 million, if Boston and Philadelphia costs are any indication. In addition to speeding up general boarding, high platforms permit wheelchair users to board trains without the aid of an attendant or conductor. All of this costs money – the infrastructure should cost somewhat more than$1 billion, and new rolling stock should cost about $1.5 billion at European costs, or somewhat more if there’s an American premium for canceling the in-progress contract for inferior equipment. But none of this costs a lot of money. New Jersey is ready to sink$2.75 billion of state money as part of an 11 billion Gateway tunnel that would do nothing for capacity (since it four-tracks the tunnel but not the surface segments to Newark); it should be ready to spend about the amount of money on a program that is certain to cut 25-50% off of people’s travel time and perhaps halve operating costs. # How Fast New York Regional Rail Could Be Part 2 In my last post about New York regional rail schedules, I covered the New Haven and Harlem Lines of Metro-North and the Main Line and Hempstead Branch of the LIRR. I was hoping to cover more lines tonight, but due to time constraints only the Hudson Line is available. This post should be viewed as considerably more accurate than the previous one, because I’ve obtained a Metro-North track chart with exact curve radii. I had to use measuring tools in the previous posts, and although the results were generally accurate, they were not completely so, and a few short, sharp curves cost a few more seconds than depicted. I do not believe the total slowdown between New York and either New Haven or Southeast to be worse than one minute relative to the track chart, but it is a slight slowdown, more than countermanding my tendency to round all fractional seconds up in speed zones. Capital expenses One key difference with my last post is that the Hudson Line is not entirely electrified. It is only electrified south of Croton-Harmon; farther north, trains run with diesel locomotives, changing to electric mode only in Manhattan. My timetable assumes electrification. This is a project Metro-North should be pursuing anyway, since the outer Hudson Line is one of the busiest diesel lines in New York, alongside the outer Port Jefferson Branch and the Raritan Valley Line. This lack of electrification extends to part of the express tracks south of Croton-Harmon as well. As a result, this schedule, while relying on cheap investments, is not quite the near-zero cost improvement on the express line. On the local line it is, since the trains are electrified. As before, I am not assuming any curve is straightened, merely that track geometry trains fix the tracks to have higher superelevation (150 mm) and that trains run at 150 mm cant deficiency rather than today’s 3″. In metric units, this means acceleration in the horizontal plane is 2 m/s^2, so curves obey the formula $\mbox{speed} = \sqrt{2\times\mbox{curve radius}}.$ One big-ticket item that Metro-North should look into, in addition to completing electrification, is grade-separating the interlocking at CP 5, between the Hudson and Harlem Lines. The flat junction is extremely busy – it may plausibly have higher peak throughput than the flat junctions that plague South London’s commuter rail network – and hinders a simple 2-tracks-in, 2-tracks-out operation. This is not strictly speaking a speedup, but I would be more comfortable writing aggressive, high-frequency timetables if trains did not conflict at-grade. Local schedule Local trains run up to Croton-Harmon, making all stops.  Station Current time Future M-7 time Future Euro time Grand Central 0:00 0:00 0:00 Harlem-125th 0:10 0:06 0:06 Yankees-153rd 0:15 0:09 0:09 Morris Heights 0:18 0:12 0:12 University Heights 0:20 0:14 0:14 Marble Hill 0:22 0:16 0:16 Spuyten Duyvil 0:24 0:18 0:17 Riverdale 0:28 0:21 0:20 Ludlow 0:30 0:24 0:23 Yonkers 0:33 0:26 0:25 Glenwood 0:35 0:28 0:27 Greystone 0:38 0:31 0:29 Hastings-on-Hudson 0:42 0:34 0:31 Dobbs Ferry 0:45 0:36 0:33 Ardsley-on-Hudson 0:47 0:39 0:36 Irvington 0:49 0:41 0:38 Tarrytown 0:53 0:44 0:41 Sleepy Hollow 0:55 0:47 0:43 Scarborough 0:59 0:50 0:46 Ossining 1:02 0:53 0:48 Croton-Harmon 1:11 0:56 0:52 The 9-minute interstation between Ossining and Croton-Harmon represents end-of-line schedule padding – in the southbound direction, trains are scheduled to take only 4 minutes. Observe that the travel time difference is smaller than on the other lines presented in my previous post. Current equipment could shave 21% off the travel time, which is considerable but a far cry from the 33-40% elsewhere in the system. The reason is that the Hudson Line is maintained to higher standards, with cruise speeds of 80 mph on much of the line; I am assuming a speedup to 160 km/h, but the stop spacing along the Hudson is so short that trains can’t even hit 160 km/h while accelerating. The curves are still insufficiently superelevated – the Spuyten Duyvil curve where the fatal derailment happened has only 2.5″ of superelevation – and trains are only rated for low cant deficiency. However, the other aspects of the speedup on other lines are less conspicuous. I also suspect that there is less schedule padding on the Hudson Line than on the other lines. Its frequency is lower, the line is four-track for most of its length, and the one significant flat junction equally affects the other two Metro-North mainlines. So the schedule may already be stable enough that padding, while considerable, is less outrageous than on the LIRR. Express schedule Express trains on the Hudson Line run a variety of stopping patterns, especially at rush hour. The line’s infrastructure is set up for intermediate express stops at Harlem, Marble Hill, Yonkers, Tarrytown, Ossining, and Croton-Harmon, but the standard off-peak pattern makes slightly fewer stops. My assumption is that all the above stations will receive express service.  Station Current time Future M-7 time Future Euro time Grand Central 0:00 0:00 0:00 Harlem-125th 0:11 0:06 0:06 Marble Hill — 0:13 0:13 Yonkers — 0:18 0:18 Tarrytown 0:39 0:27 0:26 Ossining 0:47 0:32 0:31 Croton-Harmon 0:53 0:35 0:34 Cortlandt 1:01 0:41 0:39 Peekskill 1:06 0:44 0:42 Manitou — 0:50 0:48 Garrison 1:17 0:54 0:51 Cold Spring 1:21 0:57 0:55 Breakneck Ridge — 1:00 0:58 Beacon 1:30 1:05 1:02 New Hamburg 1:38 1:10 1:07 Poughkeepsie 1:55 1:15 1:12 This is a 35-38% reduction in travel time while making four more stops, two on the inner part of the line and two on the outer part that currently only see occasional seasonal use for hiking trails. The explanation for this is simple: the rolling stock used today is not M-7 EMUs but diesel locomotives. Rush hour trains running nonstop between Manhattan and Beacon connect Grand Central with Poughkeepsie in 1:36-1:37, a stop penalty of about 2.5 minutes, twice as high as what a European regional EMU can achieve at a top speed of 160 km/h. Moreover, the 80-90 mph speed limit, which is dead letter on local trains for most of the way because they stop so frequently, consumes a few minutes relative to 160 km/h when trains run nonstop for long stretches. Thus, an increase in top speed is necessary in addition to an increase in curve superelevation and cant deficiency. What about Grand Central? My schedules consistently depict 6-minute trip times between Grand Central and Harlem, compared with current timetables that have them do it in 10-11 minutes. On most of the line, the top speed is the same – 60 mph, against 100 km/h in my timetable. The difference is entirely in the last mile out of Grand Central, where the limit today is 10 mph for no good reason. The constrained environment of Grand Central does not leave room for high-speed switches. Nonetheless, the existing switches, called #8 switches, have a curve radius of about 140 meters, which is good enough for 40 km/h with no superelevation and a cant deficiency of 150 mm. American switches are generally rated for twice their number in miles per hour, assuming no superelevation and a 2″ cant deficiency; but higher cant deficiency is possible, and is really important as the difference between 25 and 40 km/h for a few hundred meters is considerable. Moreover, 40 km/h is only the governing speed for a very short distance, about half a kilometer. Farther out, trains can always take the straight direction on turnouts, with one exception, turnout number 309B on the southbound local track (track 4), which is a triangular switch, i.e. one without a straight direction. Fixing the switch to have a straight direction from track 4 to track J, the westernmost approach track to the lower level of the station, should be a priority, plausibly saving 3 minutes for all trains using this track. With trains taking the straight direction wherever possible, the central express tracks in the Park Avenue Tunnel (tracks 1 and 2) should exclusively feed the upper level, and the outer local tracks should exclusively feed the lower level; this way, there would not be any conflict. The station was originally designed for local trains to use the lower level and express trains to use the upper level, so this is nothing new, just a more rigid way of running service than today. Each of the two levels has ladder tracks permitting access to about 10 platform tracks, which is more enough for a train every 2 minutes; for reference, the 4 platform tracks of Haussmann-Saint Lazare on the RER E turn 16 trains per hour at the peak today, and were constructed with the ability to turn 18. The upshot is that very little station reconstruction is needed at this stage. Some reconstruction is required for through-running, as it would require all approach tracks to go to the lower level, but even that would be much cheaper than the through-running tunnels. But with terminating service, only one switch needs to be changed. This is not expensive; the limiting resource is imagination to do better than today’s slow service. # How Fast New York Regional Rail Could Be A few years ago, when I started writing timetables for proposed regional rail lines, I realized how much faster they were than current schedules. This goes beyond the usual issues in Boston with electrification, which can cut the Boston-Providence trip from the current 1:10 or so to around 45 minutes. In New York the trains are already electrified, but trip times are slow, due to a combination of weak rolling stock, low platforms in New Jersey, poor maintenance in Connecticut, and obscene schedule padding in Long Island. This post collects a few before-and-after comparisons of how fast regional rail in New York could be. Due to time constraints, not all lines are included in this post; by popular demand I can complete this and make it a two-part post. In this post I am going to focus on the New Haven and Harlem Lines and the LIRR’s Ronkonkoma and Hempstead Branches. The LIRR and Metro-North both have reasonable if conservative equipment. Thus, it is valuable to look at the trip times that current equipment could achieve, that is the M-8s on the New Haven Line and the M-7s on the other lines. Future equipment should be higher-performance, and in particular both railroads should procure modular platforms based on proven European regional rail designs, rather than stick with overweight, overpriced equipment as in the upcoming capital plan. Thus the following tables include trip times with both current equipment and a notional regional electric multiple unit (EMU) with the specs of a Talent 2, FLIRT, Coradia Continental, DBAG Class 425, or similar train. As a note of caution, these trip times are not achievable at zero cost, only at low cost. No curve needs to be straightened, but some curves need to be superelevated, and in some areas, particularly Connecticut, additional track work is required. All of this is quite cheap based on European maintenance regimes, though perhaps not based on American ones, but it is not literally a day one timetable – figure a few months’ worth of work systemwide. Schedules would also need to be simpler, with fewer creative express patterns, to facilitate low schedule padding, 7% as in Switzerland rather than the LIRR’s current 30% pad. Much of this work comes from this post about the LIRR and this one about the New Haven Line, but here I’m covering the Harlem and Hudson Lines as well, and using more recent computations for acceleration. New Haven Line Locals to Stamford:  Station Current time Future M-8 time Future Euro time Grand Central 0:00 0:00 0:00 Harlem-125th 0:10 0:06 0:06 Fordham 0:18 0:12 0:11 Mount Vernon East 0:27 0:18 0:16 Pelham 0:30 0:20 0:18 New Rochelle 0:33 0:23 0:21 Larchmont 0:37 0:26 0:24 Mamaroneck 0:40 0:29 0:27 Harrison 0:43 0:32 0:29 Rye 0:48 0:35 0:31 Port Chester 0:51 0:37 0:33 Greenwich 0:55 0:40 0:36 Cos Cob 0:59 0:43 0:39 Riverside 1:02 0:45 0:41 Old Greenwich 1:04 0:47 0:42 Stamford 1:15 0:50 0:45 Some of the numbers are interpolated, but the end-to-end times as well as those to New Rochelle, Port Chester, and Riverside are exact. No curve is straightened, but all non-geometric speed limits, including those on the Cos Cob Bridge, are removed; the Cos Cob Bridge is not straight enough for high-speed rail, but a regional train could squeeze 150 km/h out of it, or 160 if it is replaced. Expresses to New Haven are faster, as detailed in my older post on the subject:  Station Current time Future M-8 time Future Euro time Grand Central 0:00 0:00 0:00 Harlem-125th 0:10 0:06 0:06 New Rochelle — 0:18 0:17 Stamford 0:51 0:31 0:30 Noroton Heights 0:56 0:35 0:34 Darien 1:00 0:38 0:36 Rowayton 1:03 0:40 0:38 South Norwalk 1:07 0:43 0:41 East Norwalk 1:10 0:46 0:43 Westport 1:14 0:49 0:46 Greens Farms 1:18 0:53 0:49 Southport 1:23 0:56 0:52 Fairfield 1:26 0:58 0:54 Fairfield Metro 1:30 1:01 0:57 Bridgeport 1:38 1:05 1:00 Stratford 1:45 1:10 1:04 Milford 1:52 1:14 1:08 West Haven 1:59 1:20 1:14 New Haven 2:09 1:24 1:18 Numbers differ from my older post by a minute to allow for slightly slower approaches to the Grand Central stub-end, at 50 km/h rather than 100 km/h as with any future through-running. This is still several minutes faster than the current 10 mph speed limit out to a mile out of the station. It doesn’t matter too much; at the end of the day, this is a difference of 1:18 vs. 2:09, with one extra station. I repeat: better track maintenance, less conservative terminal approach speeds, higher superelevation on curves, modern schedule padding, and (on the margin) higher-performance equipment could reduce trip times from 2:09 to 1:18, a cut of 40% in trip time, without straightening a single curve. Harlem Line The Harlem Line today runs local and express trains, but this involves a long stretch from north of Mount Vernon West to North White Plains with three and two rather than four tracks; trains just don’t run frequently enough today that it’s a problem, but in the future they will need to. Therefore, my timetable below is all-local. Nonetheless, trip times to White Plains on the local train are comparable to those of today’s express trains.  Station Current time (local) Current time (express) Future M-7 time Future Euro time Grand Central 0:00 0:00 0:00 0:00 Harlem-125th 0:10 0:10 0:06 0:06 Melrose 0:14 — 0:09 0:09 Tremont 0:17 — 0:12 0:11 Fordham 0:20 — 0:14 0:13 Botanical Gardens 0:22 — 0:16 0:15 Williams Bridge 0:25 — 0:18 0:17 Woodlawn 0:28 — 0:21 0:19 Wakefield 0:30 — 0:23 0:21 Mount Vernon West 0:32 — 0:24 0:23 Fleetwood 0:35 — 0:27 0:25 Bronxville 0:37 — 0:29 0:27 Tuckahoe 0:39 — 0:31 0:28 Crestwood 0:42 — 0:33 0:30 Scarsdale 0:46 — 0:36 0:33 Hartsdale 0:49 — 0:38 0:35 White Plains 0:53 0:36 0:41 0:38 North White Plains 1:01 0:41 0:44 0:40 Valhalla 0:45 0:47 0:43 Hawthorne 0:49 0:50 0:46 Pleasantville 0:53 0:53 0:49 Chappaqua 0:56 0:56 0:52 Mount Kisco 1:02 1:00 0:55 Bedford Hills 1:06 1:04 0:59 Katonah 1:09 1:07 1:01 Goldens Bridge 1:13 1:10 1:04 Purdy’s 1:17 1:13 1:08 Croton Falls 1:20 1:16 1:10 Brewster 1:26 1:20 1:15 Southeast 1:37 1:22 1:16 Observe that the current schedule has very long trip times before the end station – 8 minutes from White Plains to North White Plains on the local, 11 from Brewster to Southeast on the express. Southbound, both segments are timetabled to take only 4 minutes each. This is additional padding used to artificially inflate on-time performance, in lieu of the better practice of spacing out the pad throughout the schedule, at 1 minute per 15 minutes. LIRR Main Line The LIRR has a highly-branched system, and I’m only going to portray the Main Line to Ronkonkoma among the long express lines. This is because in the long term, the South Side lines shouldn’t be going to Penn Station but to Downtown Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan. The Port Jefferson Branch could benefit from a side-by-side comparison of trip times, but that is partly a matter of electrifying the outer part of the line, a project that is perennially on the LIRR’s wishlist.  Station Current time Future M-7 time Future Euro time Penn Station 0:00 0:00 0:00 Sunnyside Junction — 0:05 0:05 Woodside 0:10 — — Jamaica 0:20 0:12 0:12 Floral Park — 0:17 0:17 New Hyde Park — 0:20 0:19 Merillon Avenue — 0:22 0:21 Mineola 0:37 0:24 0:23 Carle Place — 0:28 0:26 Westbury — 0:30 0:28 Hicksville 0:45 0:33 0:31 Bethpage 0:51 0:37 0:34 Farmingdale 0:55 0:40 0:37 Pinelawn 1:00 0:43 0:40 Wyandanch 1:02 0:46 0:43 Deer Park 1:06 0:50 0:47 Brentwood 1:11 0:54 0:50 Central Islip 1:15 0:57 0:53 Ronkonkoma 1:22 1:01 0:57 The fastest Main Line train of the day runs between Penn Station and Ronkonkoma stopping only at Hicksville, Brentwood, and Central Islip, not even stopping at Jamaica; it does the trip in 1:08, a few minutes worse than the M7 could with less schedule padding and small speedups at terminal zones (Penn Station throat slowdowns add 1-2 minutes, it’s not the mile-long slog of Grand Central). Hempstead Branch Finally, for local service supplementing the rapid Main Line, we can look at the Hempstead Branch, which under my regional rail maps should keep serving Penn Station along today’s alignment, continuing north along the Empire Connection to the Hudson Line. Today, only a handful of peak trains run between Penn Station and Hempstead – off-peak, Hempstead diverts to Atlantic Terminal. Here are side-by-side schedules, using the fastest peak train as a comparison:  Station Current time Future M-7 time Future Euro time Penn Station 0:00 0:00 0:00 Sunnyside Junction — 0:05 0:05 Woodside 0:11 0:08 0:07 Forest Hills — 0:12 0:11 Kew Gardens — 0:14 0:13 Jamaica 0:20 0:16 0:15 Hollis 0:28 0:19 0:18 Bellerose 0:31 0:22 0:20 Queens Village 0:33 0:24 0:22 Floral Park 0:35 0:26 0:24 Stewart Manor 0:38 0:28 0:26 Nassau Boulevard 0:41 0:30 0:28 Garden City 0:43 0:32 0:30 Country Life Press 0:47 0:34 0:32 Hempstead 0:51 0:36 0:33 Conclusion Across the four lines examined – New Haven, Harlem, Main, Hempstead – trains could run about 50-66% faster, i.e. taking 33-40% less time. This is despite the fact that the rolling stock today is already EMUs: the vast majority of the speedup does not come from upgrading to higher-end trains, but rather from running faster on curves as all EMUs can, avoiding unnecessary slowdowns in station throats, and reducing schedule padding through more regular timetables. The speedup is so great that the Harlem Line could achieve the same trip times of present-day nonstop trains on locals making 14 more stops between Manhattan and North White Plains, a distance of 38 km, and the LIRR could achieve substantially faster trip times than today’s nonstops on semi-rapid trains. In fact, the LIRR could even make additional local stops on the Main Line like Forest Hills and Hollis and roughly match the fastest peak trains, but expected traffic volumes are such that it’s best to leave the locals to the Hempstead Branch and put the Main Line on the express tracks. Good transit activists in and around New York should insist that the managers prioritize such speedups. If locals can match today’s express trip times, there is no need to run creative express stopping patterns that force trains into complex patterns of overtakes. Just run frequent local service, using the maxim that a line deserves express service if and only if it has four tracks, as the New Haven Line and shared Main Line-Hempstead Branch segment do. With the slowest speed zones sped up, curve speeds raised to the capabilities of modern EMUs (including the conservative M-7s and M-8s), and schedule padding shrunk to where it should be, the suburbs could be so much closer to Manhattan at rush hour as well as off-peak, stimulating tighter metropolitan connections. # Small is not Resilient I wrote about how the future is not retro, and Daniel Herriges Strong Towns just responded, saying that traditional development is timeless. I urge all readers to click the last link and read the article, which makes some good points about how cars hollowed out what both Daniel and I call the traditional prewar Midwestern town. There are really two big flaws in the piece. First, it makes some claims about inequality and segregation that are true in American cities but false in the example I give for spiky development, Vancouver. And second, it brings up the resilience of the traditional small town. It’s the second point that I wish to contest: small is not resilient, and moreover, as the economy and society evolve, the minimum size required for resilience rises. Small cities in the 2010s In the premodern era, a city of 50,000 was a bustling metropolis. In 1900, it was still a sizable city. In 2019, it is small. The difference is partly relative: a migrant to the big city had the option of moving to a few 200,000 cities in 1900 and one of about ten 1,000,000+ cities, whereas today the same migrant can move to many metro areas with millions of people. But part of it has to do with changes in the economy. In Adam Smith’s day, big businesses were rare. If you had five employees, you were a big employer. Then came the factory system and firm size grew, but even then companies were small by the standards of today’s specialized economy. A city of 50,000 might well specialize in a single product, as was common in the American manufacturing belt (Krugman mentions this on pp. 11-12 here), but there would be many factories each with a few hundred employees. But as the economy grows more complex, firm size grows, and so does the interdependence between different firms in the same supply chain. Moreover, the support functions within a city grow in complexity: schools, a hospital, logistics, retail, and so on. The proportion of the population employed in the core factory is lower, as the factory’s high productivity supports more non-manufacturing employees. The upshot is that it’s easy for a town of 50,000 to live off of a single firm and its supply chain. This is not resilient: if the firm fails, the town dies. Occasionally, cities of that size can have more resilience. Perhaps they’re suburbs of a larger city, in which case they live off of commuting to a more diverse economic center. Perhaps they happen to live off of an industry that cannot die so easily, such as a state capital or a university. On social media one of my followers brought up farming as an example of an activity whose towns have held up in the Midwest better than manufacturing towns; farming is in fact extremely risky, but it has been subsidized since the 1930s, so it has some resilience thanks to subsidies from more internally resilient parts of the country. Large cities and resilience I read Ed Glaeser not so much for his observations about the housing market – he’s a lot of things but he’s not a housing economist – as for his economic history. He has a pair of excellent papers describing the economic histories of Boston and New York respectively. Boston, he argues, has reinvented itself three times in the last 200 years after declining, using its high education levels to move up the value chain. New York was never in decline except in the 1970s, and has resiled from its 1980 low as well. These as well as other large cities have economic diversity that small cities could never hope to have. At the time Glaeser wrote his paper about New York, in 2005, the city seemed dominated by finance and related industries. And yet in the 2007-9 recession, which disproportionately hit finance, the metro area’s per capita income relative to the national average barely budged, falling from 135.3% to 133.8%; in 2017 it was up to 137.5%. The New York region is a center of finance, yes, but it’s also a center of media, academic research, biotech, and increasingly software. New York is extremely large, and has large clusters in many industries, as do London, Paris, Tokyo, and other megacities. But even medium-size cities often have several clusters, if not so many. This is especially evident in Germany, where Munich, Hamburg, Stuttgart, and Frankfurt are not particularly large. Munich is the center of conglomerates in a variety of industries, including cars (BMW, far and away the largest employer, but also MAN), general industry (Siemens), chemicals (Linde), and finance (Allianz). What’s true is that these large cities have much more knowledge work than menial work – yes, even Munich, much more a center of engineering than of menial production. But the future is not retro in the mix of jobs any more than it is in its urban layout. The nostalgics of the middle of the 20th century taxed productive industrial cities to subsidize farmers, treating industrial work as the domain of socialists, Jews, immigrants, and other weirdos; the nostalgics of the early 21st century propose to tax productive knowledge economies to subsidize menial workers, and in some specific cases, like American protection of its auto industry, this has been the case for decades. Small cities as suburbs In Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands, unlike in the United States or France, there is a vigorous tradition of historic small cities becoming suburbs of larger cities while retaining their identity. This doesn’t really involve any of Strong Towns’ bêtes noires about roads and streets – in fact pretty much all of these cities have extensive sprawl with big box retail and near-universal car ownership. Rather, they have tight links with larger urban cores via regional rail networks, and German zoning is less strict about commercialization of near-center residential areas than American zoning. There was also no history of white flight in these areas – the white flight in Germany is in the cores of very large cities, like Berlin, which can replace fleeing whites one to one with immigrants. In this sense, various Rhineland cities like Worms and Speyer do better than Midwestern cities of the same size. But even though they maintain their historic identities, they are not truly economically independent. In that sense, a better American analogy would be various cities in New England and the mid-Atlantic that have fallen into the megalopolis’s orbit, such as Salem, Worcester, Providence, Worcester, New Brunswick, and Wilmington. Many of these are poor because of the legacy of suburbanization and white flight, but their built-up areas aren’t so poor. However, the most important link between such small cities and larger urban core, the regional railway, heavily encourages spiky development. In Providence, developers readily build mid-rise housing right next to Providence Station. If the quality of regional rail to Boston improves, they will presumably be willing to build even more, potentially going taller, or slightly farther from the station. Elsewhere in the city, rents are not high enough to justify much new construction, and Downcity is so weak that the tallest building, the Superman Building, is empty. In effect, Providence’s future economic value is as part of the Boston region. The relatively even development of past generations is of less use in such a city. The economy of a Providence or a Wilmington is not strong enough that everyone can work in the city and earn a good wage. If the most important destination is a distant core like Boston or Philadelphia, then people will seek locations right near the train station. Driving is not by itself useful – why drive an hour from Rhode Island when cheaper suburbs are available within half an hour? Connecting from local transit would be feasible if the interchange were as tightly timed and integrated as in Germany, but even then this system would be oriented around one dot – the train station – rather than a larger walkable downtown area. A bigger city is a better city Resilience in the sense of being able to withstand economic shocks requires a measure of economic diversity. This has always been easier in larger cities than in smaller ones. Moreover, over time there is size category creep: the size that would classify a city a hundred years ago as large barely qualifies it to be medium-size today, especially in a large continental superpower like the US. As global economic complexity increases, the size of businesses and their dedicated supply chains as well as local multipliers rises. The city size that was perfectly resilient in an economy with a GDP per capita of15,000 is fragile in an economy with a GDP per capita of $60,000. Usually, the absolute richest or more successful places may not be so big. There are hundreds of American metro areas, so a priori there is no reason for New York to be at the top, just as there is no reason for it to be at the bottom. Nonetheless, the fact that larger cities are consistently richer as well as at less risk of decline than smaller cities – New York is one of the richest metro areas, just not the single richest – should give people who think small is beautiful pause. Whatever one’s aesthetic judgment about the beauty of the upper Mississippi versus that of the lower Hudson, the economic and social system of very large places weathers crises better, and produces more consistent prosperity. Economically and socially, a bigger city is a better city, and national development policy should reject nostalgia and make it possible for developers to build where there is demand – that is, in the richest, most populated metro areas, enabling these regions to grow further by infill as well as accretion. Just as 50,000 was fine in 1900 but isn’t today, a million is fine today but may not be in 2100, and it’s important to enable larger cities to form where people want to live and open businesses. # New York Rolling Stock Costs are Skyrocketing The Metropolitan Transportation Authority has just released its capital plan for 2020-4. The cost is very high and the benefits substantial but limited, and I urge people to look over criticism by Henry Grabar at Slate about elevators and Ben Kabak’s overview at Second Avenue Sagas. Here I am going to focus on one worrying element: the cost of the trains themselves, on both the subway and commuter rail. I started comparing subway construction costs nearly ten years ago. Here’s an early post on Second Avenue Sagas, hoisting something I wrote in comments. Over here I started writing about this in 2011. Early on, I was asked about the costs of the trains themselves rather than the tunnels, and said that no, there’s no New York premium there. At the time the most recent rolling stock order for the subway was the R160, for which the base order cost was$1.25 billion for 620 cars (source, PDF-p. 34), or about $110,000 per meter of length. Commuter rail was similar, about$2 million per 25-meter-long M7 in the early 2000s and $760 million for 300 M8s of the same length in the mid-2000s. London’s then-current order, the S Stock, cost £1.5 billion for 191 trains and 1,395 cars, around$90,000 per meter of length for narrower trains; Paris’s MP 05, a driverless rubber-tired train, cost €474 million for 49 trainsets, around $140,000 per meter. But since then, costs have rapidly risen. The gap is still far smaller than that for infrastructure, which New York builds for an order of magnitude higher cost than the rest-of-world median. But it’s no longer a rounding error. Subway rolling stock costs are rising, and commuter rail rolling stock are rising even faster. The latest subway order, the R211, costs$1.45 billion for 535 cars, or $150,000 per meter, for the base order, and$3.69 billion for 1,612 cars, or $130,000 per meter, including options. Commuter rail equipment costs, once about$100,000 per meter of train length, inched up to $2.7 million per car in 2013, or$110,000 per meter, and then rose to $150,000 per meter for the M9 order. Construction costs: subway trains The 2020-4 capital plan has showcased even further rolling stock cost escalation. Go to the link for the MTA capital plan again. On PDF-p. 23 there’s a breakdown of different items on the subway, and rolling stock is$6.057 billion for a total of 1,977 cars, of which 900 are 15 meters long and the rest (I believe) 18, for a total of $185,000 per linear meter. I’ve blogged before about comparative costs of light rail and regional rail rolling stock. In Europe, both still cluster around$100,000 per linear meter for single-level, non-high-speed equipment. There is no apparent premium over early- and mid-2000s cost even without adjusting for inflation, which is not surprising, as the real prices of manufactured goods tend to fall over time. But what about metros? Here, too, we can look at first-world world comparisons.

In London, a recent Piccadilly line order is, in exchange rate terms, $190,000/meter (the trains are 103 m long) – but it includes 40 years of maintenance and spare parts. In Singapore, a recent order is S$2.1 million per car, which is about $70,000 per meter in exchange rate terms. Grand Paris Express’s first tranche of orders costs €1.3 billion for 183 trains totaling 948 cars, each (I believe) 15 meters long, around$120,000 per meter. Metro Report states Busan’s recent order as 55.6 billion for 48 trainsets (replacing 140-meter long trains), which is almost certainly an error; assuming the actual cost is 556 billion, this is $70,000/meter in exchange rate terms and$90,000/meter in PPP terms (PPP is relevant as this is an entirely domestic order).

In Berlin, the situation is the diciest, with the highest costs outside New York (not counting London’s maintenance-heavy contracts). An emergency order of 20 52-meter trains, tendered because cracks were discovered in the existing trains, cost €120 million, around $150,000 per linear meter. A longer-term contract to supply 1,500 cars (some 13 meters long, most 16.5 meters long) for €3 billion by 2035 is on hold due to litigation: Siemens had already sued over the emergency order of Stadler cars, but now Alstom made its own challenge. But even here, costs are well below the levels of New York, even before we adjust for inflation since Berlin’s future contract is in 2020-35 prices and New York’s is in in 2020-24 prices. Construction costs: New York-area commuter rail Commuter rail is faring even worse. On PDF-p. 27 the LIRR is listed as spending$242 million on 17 coaches and 12 locomotives, and on PDF-p. 29 Metro-North is listed as spending $853 million on 80 EMU cars and 30 locomotives. Figuring out exact comparisons is not easy, because locomotives do cost more than multiple-units and unpowered coaches, and there is a range of locomotive costs, with uncertainty due to currency conversions, as most information I can find about European locomotives is in Eastern Europe with its weak currencies, since Western Europe mostly uses multiple-units. Railway Gazette’s pages on the world rolling stock market suggest that a European locomotive is around €5 million (e.g. the PKP Vectron order), or$6.5 million; PKP’s domestic order (including some dual-modes) is around $4.2 million per unit measured in exchange rate terms, but twice as much in PPP terms; Bombardier has a sale to an undisclosed customer for about$4.8 million. Siemens claims the Vectron costs €2.5 million per unit, although all the contracts for which I can find prices are substantially more expensive.

For what it’s worth, in the US dual-mode locomotives for New Jersey Transit cost around $9.5 million apiece, which is still evidently lower than what the LIRR and Metro-North plan on spending. 242 – 9.5*12 = 128, and 128/17 = 7.5, or$300,000 per linear meter of unpowered coach; similarly, 853 – 9.5*30 = 568, and 568/80 = 7.1, or $280,000 per linear meter of new Metro-North EMU. If we take the normal-world cost of a locomotive at$6 million and that of an EMU or coach at 2.5 million per US-length car, then the LIRR has a factor-of-2.1 cost premium and Metro-North a factor-of-2.2 premium. The equipment is conservative The FRA recently realigned its regulations to permit lightly-modified European mainline trains to run on American tracks. Nonetheless, no American commuter rail operator has taken advantage of the new rules – the only ones buying European equipment had plans to do so even before the revision, going through costly waiver process that increased costs. At a public meeting last month, Metro-North’s vice president of engineering did not even know FRA rules had changed. The LIRR and Metro-North are buying the same equipment, to the same standards, as they have for decades. The subway, likewise, is conservative. It is a laggard in adopting open gangways: the R211 order is the first one to include any, but that is just two test trainsets, the rest having doors between cars like all other older New York trainsets. It is not buying any of the modular products of the global vendors, like Bombardier’s Movia platform or the Alstom Metropolis. It is buying largely the same kind of equipment it has bought since the 1990s. Despite this conservatism, costs are very high, consistent with a factor somewhat higher than 2 on commuter rail and somewhat lower than 2 on the subway. But perhaps the conservatism is what increases costs in the first place? Perhaps the reason costs are high is that the world market has moved on and the MTA and some other American operators have not noticed. In Chicago, Metra found itself trying to order a type of gallery car that nobody makes any longer, using parts that are no longer available. Perhaps the same kind of outmoded thinking is present at the MTA, and this is why costs have exploded in the last 10 years. A secular increase in costs of infrastructure construction is nearly universal. No such trend can be seen in rolling stock: nominal costs in Paris are 15% lower than they were 15 years ago, and real costs are about 30% lower, whereas in New York nominal costs are 70% higher than 10 years ago and real costs about 40% higher. Paris keeps innovating – M1 and M14 have the highest frequency of any metro system in the world, a train every 85 seconds at the peak, and M1 is the first driverless line converted from earlier manual operations rather than built from scratch. In contrast, New York is stuck in the 1990s, but far from keeping a lid on costs, it has seen rolling stock cost explosion. Update 9/24: I just saw a new commuter rail coach order in Boston. These are bilevels so some cost premium is to be expected, but345 million for 80 unpowered coaches, or \$170,000 per meter, is excessive, and TransitMatters tried hard to fight against this order, arguing in favor of EMUs on the already-electrified Providence Line.

# Circumferential Lines and Express Service

In a number of large cities with both radial and circumferential urban rail service, there is a curious observation: there is express service on the radial lines, but not the circumferential ones. These cities include New York, Paris, and Berlin, and to some extent London and Seoul. Understanding why this is the case is useful in general: it highlights guidelines for urban public transport design that have implications even outside the distinction between radial and circumferential service. In brief, circumferential lines are used for shorter trips than radial lines, and in large cities connect many different spokes so that an express trip would either skip important stations or not save much time.

The situation

Berlin has three S-Bahn trunk lines: the Ringbahn, the east-west Stadtbahn, and the North-South Tunnel. The first two have four tracks. The last is a two-track tunnel, but has recently been supplemented with a parallel four-track North-South Main Line tunnel, used by regional and intercity trains.

The Stadtbahn has a straightforward local-express arrangement: the S-Bahn uses the local tracks at very high frequency, whereas the express tracks host less frequent regional trains making about half as many stops as well as a few intercity trains only making two stops. The north-south system likewise features very frequent local trains on the S-Bahn, and a combination of somewhat less frequent regional trains making a few stops on the main line and many intercity trains making fewer stops. In contrast, the Ringbahn has no systemic express service: the S-Bahn includes trains running on the entire Ring frequently as well as trains running along segments of it stopping at every station on the way, but the only express services are regional trains that only serve small slivers on their way somewhere else and only come once or twice an hour.

This arrangement is mirrored in other cities. In Paris, the entire Metro network except Line 14 is very local, with the shortest interstations and lowest average speeds among major world metro systems. For faster service, there is Line 14 as well as the RER system, tying the suburbs together with the city. Those lines are exclusively radial. The busiest single RER line, the RER A, was from the start designed as an express line parallel to Line 1, the Metro’s busiest, and the second busiest, the RER B, is to a large extent an express version of the Metro’s second busiest line, Line 4. However, there is no RER version of the next busiest local lines, the ring formed by Lines 2 and 6. For non-Metro circumferential service, the region went down the speed/cost tradeoff and built tramways, which have been a total success and have high ridership even though they’re slow.

In New York, the subway was built with four-track main lines from the start to enable express service. Five four-track lines run north-south in Manhattan, providing local and express service. Outside the Manhattan core, they branch and recombine into a number of three- and four-track lines in Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx. Not every radial line in New York has express service, but most do. In contrast, the circumferential Crosstown Line, carrying the G train, is entirely local.

In Seoul, most lines have no express service. However, Lines 1, 3, and 4 interline with longer-range commuter rail services, and Lines 1 and 4 have express trains on the commuter rail segments. They are all radial; the circumferential Line 2 has no express trains.

Finally, in London, the Underground has few express segments (all radial), but in addition to the Underground the city has or will soon have express commuter lines, including Thameslink and Crossrail. There are no plans for express service parallel to the Overground.

Is Tokyo really an exception?

Tokyo has express trains on many lines. On the JR East network, there are lines with four or six tracks all the way to Central Tokyo, with local and express service. The private railroads usually have local and express services on their own lines, which feed into the local Tokyo subway. But not all express services go through the primary city center: the Ikebukuro-Shibuya corridor has the four-track JR Yamanote Line, with both local services (called the Yamanote Line too, running as a ring to Tokyo Station) and express services (called the Saikyo or Shonan-Shinjuku Line, continuing north and south of the city); Tokyo Metro’s Fukutoshin Line, serving the same corridor, has a timed passing segment for express trains as well.

However, in three ways, the area around Ikebukuro, Shinjuku, and Shibuya behaves as a secondary city center rather than a circumferential corridor. The job density around all three stations is very high, for one. They have extensive retail as well, as the private railroads that terminated there before they interlined with the subway developed the areas to encourage more people to use their trains. This situation is also true of some secondary clusters elsewhere in Tokyo, like Tobu’s Asakusa terminal, but Asakusa is in a historically working-class area, whereas the Yamanote area was historically and still is wealthier, making it easier for it to attract corporate jobs.

Second, from the perspective of the transportation network, they are central enough that railroads that have the option to serve them do so, even at the expense of service to Central Tokyo. When the Fukutoshin Line opened, Tokyu shifted one of its two mainlines, the Toyoko Line, to connect to it and serve this secondary center, where it previously interlined with the Hibiya Line to Central Tokyo; Tokyu serves Central Tokyo via its other line, the Den-en-Toshi Line, which connects to the Hanzomon Line of the subway. JR East, too, prioritizes serving Shinjuku from the northern and southern suburbs: the Shonan-Shinjuku Line is a reverse-branch of core commuter rail lines both north and south, as direct fast service from the suburbs to Shibuya, Shinjuku, and Ikebukuro is important enough to JR East that it will sacrifice some reliability and capacity to Tokyo Station for it.

Third, as we will discuss below, the Yamanote Line has a special feature missing from circumferential corridors in Berlin and Paris: it has distinguished stations. A foreigner looking at satellite photos of land use and at a map of the region’s rail network without the stations labeled would have an easy time deciding where an express train on the line should stop: Ikebukuro, Shinjuku, and Shibuya eclipse other stations along the line, like Yoyogi and Takadanobaba. Moreover, since these three centers were established to some extent before the subway was built, the subway lines were routed to serve them; there are 11 subway lines coming from the east as well as the east-west Chuo Line, and of these, all but the Tozai and Chiyoda Lines intersect it at one of the three main stations.

Interstations and trip length

The optimal stop spacing depends on how long passenger trips are on the line: keeping all else equal, it is proportional to the square root of the average unlinked trip. The best formula is somewhat more delicate: widening the stop spacing encourages people to take longer trips as they become faster with fewer intermediate stops and discourages people from taking shorter ones as they become slower with longer walk distances to the station. However, to a first-order approximation, the square root rule remains valid.

The relevance is that not all lines have the same average trip length. Longer lines have longer trips than short lines. Moreover, circular lines have shorter average trips than straight lines of the same length, because people have no reason to ride the entire way. The Ringbahn is a 37-kilometer line on which trains take an hour to complete the circuit. But nobody has a reason to ride more than half the circle – they can just as well ride the shorter way in the other direction. Nor do passengers really have a reason to ride over exactly half the circle, because they can often take the Stadtbahn, North-South Tunnel, or U-Bahn and be at their destinations faster.

Circumferential lines are frequently used to connect to radial lines if the radial-radial connection in city center is inconvenient – maybe it’s missing entirely, maybe it’s congested, maybe it involves too much walking between platforms, maybe happens to be on the far side of city center. In all such cases, people are more likely to use the circumferential line for shorter trips than for longer ones: the more acute the angle, the more direct and thus more valuable the circle is for travel.

The relevance of this discussion to express service is that there’s more demand for express service in situations with longer optimum stop spacing. For example, the optimum stop spacing for the subway in New York based on current travel patterns is the same as that proposed for Second Avenue Subway, to within measurement error of parameters like walking speed; on the other trunk lines, the local trains have denser stop spacing and the express trains have wider stop spacing. On a line with very short optimum spacing, there is not much of a case for express service at all.

Distinguished stops versus isotropy

The formula for optimal stop spacing depends on the isotropy of travel demand. If origins and destinations are distributed uniformly along the line, then the optimal stop spacing is minimized: passengers are equally likely to live and work right on top of a station, which eliminates walk time, as they are to live and work exactly in the middle between two stations, which maximizes walk time. If the densities of origins and destinations are spiky around distinguished nodes, then the optimal stop spacing widens, because planners can place stations at key locations to minimize the number of passengers who have to walk longer. If origins are assumed to be perfectly isotropic but destinations are assumed to be perfectly clustered at such distinguished locations as city center, the optimum stop spacing is larger than if both are perfectly isotropic by a factor of $\sqrt{2}$.

Circumferential lines in large cities do not have isotropic demand. However, they have a great many distinguished stops, one at every intersection with a radial rail service. Out of 27 Ringbahn stops, 21 have a connection to the U-Bahn, a tramway, or a radial S-Bahn line. Express service would be pointless – the money would be better spent increasing local frequency, as ridership on short-hop trips like the Ringbahn’s is especially sensitive to wait time.

On the M2/M6 ring in Paris, there are 49 stops, of which 21 have connections to other Metro lines or the RER, one more doesn’t but really should (Rome, with a missed connection to an M14 extension), and one may connect to a future extension of M10. Express service is not completely pointless parallel to M2/M6, but still not too valuable. Even farther out, where the Paris region is building the M15 ring of Grand Paris Express, there are 35 stops in 69 kilometers of the main ring, practically all connecting to a radial line or located at a dense suburban city center.

The situation in New York is dicier, because the G train does have a distinguished stop location between Long Island City and Downtown Brooklyn, namely the connection to the L train at Bedford Avenue. However, the average trip length remains very short – the G misses so many transfers at both ends that end-to-end riders mostly stay on the radials and go through Manhattan, so the main use case is taking it a few stops to the connection to the L or to the Long Island City end.

Conclusion

A large urban rail network should be predominantly radial, with circumferential lines in dense areas providing additional connectivity between inner neighborhoods and decongesting the central transfer points. However, that the radial and circumferential lines are depicted together on the same metro or regional rail map does not mean that people use them in the same way. City center lies ideally on all radials but not on the circumferentials, so the tidal wave of morning commuters going from far away to the center is relevant only to the radials.

This difference between radials and circumferentials is not just about service planning, but also about infrastructure planning. Passengers make longer trips on radial lines, and disproportionately travel to one of not many distinguished central locations; this encourages longer stop spacing, which may include express service in the largest cities. On circumferential lines, they make shorter trips to one of many different connection points; this encourages shorter stop spacing and no express service, but rather higher local frequency whenever possible.

Different countries build rapid transit in radically different ways, and yet big cities in a number of different countries have converged on the same pattern: express service on the strongest radial corridors, local-only service on circumferential ones no matter how busy they are. There is a reason. Transportation planners in poorer cities that are just starting to build their rapid transit networks as well in mature cities that are adding to their existing service should take heed and design infrastructure accordingly.

# The Future is not Retro

One faction of urbanists that I’ve sometimes found myself clashing with is people who assume that a greener, less auto-centric future will look something like the traditional small towns of the past. Strong Towns is the best example I know of of this tendency, arguing against high-rise urban redevelopment and in favor of urbanism that looks like pre-freeway Midwestern main streets. But this retro attitude to the future happens everywhere, and recently I’ve had to argue about this with the generally pro-modern Cap’n Transit and his take about the future of vacations. Even the push for light rail in a number of cities has connections with nostalgia for old streetcars, to the point that some American cities build mixed-traffic streetcars, such as Portland.

The future was not retro in the 1950s

The best analogy for a zero-emissions future is ironically what it seeks to undo: the history of suburbanization. In retrospect, we can view midcentury suburbanization as a physical expansion of built-up areas at lower density, at automobile scale. But at the time, it was not always viewed this way. Socially, the suburbs were supposed to be a return to rural virtues. The American patrician reformers who advocated for them consciously wanted to get rid of ethnic urban neighborhoods and their alien cultures. The German Christian democratic push for regional road and rail connections has the same social origin, just without the ethnic dimension – cities were dens of iniquity and sin.

At the same time, the suburbs, that future of the middle of the 20th century, were completely different from the mythologized 19th century past, before cities like New York and Berlin had grown so big. Most obviously, they were linked to urban jobs; the social forces that pushed for them were aware of that in real time, and sought transportation links precisely in order to permit access to urban jobs in what they hoped would be rural living.

But a number of other key differences are visible – for one, those suburbs were near the big cities of the early 20th century, and not in areas with demographic decline. In the United States, the Great Plains and Appalachia kept depopulating and the Deep South except Atlanta kept demographically stagnating. The growth in that era of interregional convergence happened in suburbs around New York, Chicago, and other big then-industrial cities, and in parts of what would soon be called the Sunbelt, namely Southern California, Texas, and Florida. In Germany, this history is more complicated, as the stagnating region that traditionalists had hoped to repopulate was Prussia and Posen, which were given to Poland at the end of the war and ethnically cleansed of their German populations. However, we can still see postwar shifts within West Germany toward suburbs of big cities like Munich and Frankfurt, while the Ruhr stagnated.

The future of transit-oriented development is not retro

People who dislike the auto-oriented form of cities can easily romanticize how cities looked before mass motorization. They’d have uniform missing middle built form in most of the US and UK, or uniform mid-rise in New York and Continental Europe. American YIMBYs in particular easily slip into romanticizing missing middle density and asking to replace single-family housing with duplexes and triplexes rather than with anything more substantial.

If you want to see what 21st-century TOD looks like, go to the richer parts of East Asia, especially Tokyo, which builds much more housing than Hong Kong and Singapore. The density in Tokyo is anything but uniform. There are clusters of high-rise buildings next to train stations, and lower density further away, even small single-family houses fronting narrow streets far enough from train stations that it’s not economical to redevelop them. It offends nostalgic Westerners; the future often does.

In the context of a growing city like New York or London, what this means is that the suburbs can expect to look spiky. There’s no point in turning, say, everything within two kilometers of Cockfosters (or the Little Neck LIRR station) into mid-rise apartments or even rowhouses. What’s the point? There’s a lot more demand 100 meters from the station than two kilometers away, enough that people pay the construction cost premium for the 20th floor 100 meters from the stations in preference to the third floor two kilometers away. The same is true for Paris – there’s no solution for its growth needs other than high-rises near RER stations and key Metro stations in the city as well as the suburbs, like the existing social housing complexes but with less space between buildings. It may offend people who associate high-rises with either the poor or recent high-skill immigrants, but again, the future often offends traditionalists.

The future of transportation is not retro

In countries that do not rigidly prevent urban housing growth the way the US does, the trend toward reurbanization is clear. Germany’s big cities are growing while everything else is shrinking save some suburbs in the richest regions, such as around Munich. Rural France keeps depopulating.

In this context, the modes of transportation of the future are rapid transit and high-speed rail. Rapid transit is preferable to buses and surface trains in most cities, because it serves spiky development better – the stations are spaced farther apart, which is fine because population density is not isotropic and neither is job density, and larger cities need the longer range that comes with the higher average speed of the subway or regional train over that of the tramway.

High-speed rail is likewise preferable to an everywhere-to-everywhere low-speed rail network like that of Switzerland. In a country with very large metro areas spaced 500 km or so apart, like the US, France, or Germany, connecting those growing city centers is of crucial importance, while nearby cities of 100,000 are of diminishing importance. Moreover, very big cities can be connected by trains so frequent that untimed transfers are viable. Already under the Deutschlandtakt plan, there will be 2.5 trains between Berlin and Hanover every hour, and if average speeds between Berlin and the Rhine-Ruhr were increased to be in line with those of the TGVs, demand would fill 4-6 trains per hour, enough to facilitate untimed transfers from connecting lines going north and south of Hanover. The Northeast Corridor has even more latent demand, given the huge size of New York.

The future of travel is not retro

The transportation network both follows and shapes travel patterns. Rapid transit is symbiotic with spiky TOD, and high-speed rail is symbiotic with extensive intercity travel.

The implication is that the future of holidays, too, is not retro. Vacation trips between major cities will become easier if countries that are not France and Japan build a dense network of high-speed lines akin to what France has done over the last 40 years and what Japan has done over the last 60. Many of those cities have thriving tourism economies, and these can expect to expand if there are fast trains connecting them to other cities within 300-1,000 kilometers.

Sometimes, these high-speed lines could serve romanticized tourist destinations. Niagara Falls lies between New York and Toronto, and could see expansion of visits, including day trips from Toronto and Buffalo and overnight stays from New York. The Riviera will surely see more travel once the much-delayed LGV PACA puts Nice four hours away from Paris by train rather than five and a half. Even the Black Forest might see an expansion of travel if people connect from high-speed trains from the rest of Germany to regional trains at Freiburg, going from the Rhine Valley up to the mountains; but even then, I expect a future Germany’s domestic tourism to be increasingly urban, probably involving the Rhine waterfront as well as the historic cities along the river.

But for the most part, tourist destinations designed around driving, like most American national parks as well as state parks like the Catskills, will shrink in importance in a zero-carbon future. It does not matter if they used to have rail access, as Glacier National Park did; the tourism of the leisure class of the early 20th century is not the same as that of the middle class of the middle of the 21st. Grand Canyon and Yellowstone are not the only pretty places in the world or even in the United States; the Hudson Valley and the entire Pacific Coast are pretty too, and do not require either driving or taking a hypothetical train line that, on the list of the United States’ top transportation priorities, would not crack the top 100. This will offend people whose idea of environmentalism is based on the priorities of turn-of-the-century patrician conservationists, but environmental science has moved on and the nature of the biggest ecological crisis facing humanity has changed.

The non-retro future is pretty cool

The theme of the future is that, just as the Industrial Revolution involved urbanization and rural depopulation, urban development patterns this century involve growth in the big metro areas and decline elsewhere and in traditional small towns. This is fine. The status anxieties of Basil Fawlty types who either can’t or won’t adapt to a world that has little use for their prejudices are not a serious public concern.

Already, people lead full lives in big global cities like New York and London without any of the trappings of what passed for normality in the middle of the 20th century, like a detached house with a yard and no racial minorities or working-class people within sight. The rest will adapt to this reality, just as early 20th century urbanites adapted to the reality of suburbanization a generation later.

It’s not even an imposition. It’s opportunity. People can live in high-quality housing with access to extensive social as well as job networks, and travel to many different places with different languages, flora and fauna, vistas, architecture, food, and local retail. Even in the same language zone, Northern and Southern Germany look completely different from each other, as do Paris and Southern France, or New England and Washington. Then outside the cities there are enough places walking distance from a commuter rail line or on the way on a high-speed line between two cities that people can if they’d like go somewhere and spend time out of sight of other people. There’s so much to do in a regime of green prosperity; the world merely awaits the enactment of policies that encourage such a future in lieu of one dominated by small-minded local interests who define themselves by how much they can pollute.